For some years I’ve been writing for the magazine Geare, usually just reviews of the assorted bits and pieces that I review. I was always a bit ambivalent about it because Geare is one of those ‘guys’ magazines, in which everything purported to be of interest to men was gathered within its pages — cars, home entertainment, cameras, motorbikes … and girls. There was always a multi-page spread of some attractive young lady, scantily dressed, with just a, er, fig-leaf of relevance in the form of a product list on each page (watch by so-and-so Swiss watch-making firm, G-string by such-and-such).
Not porn by the conventional measure of level of exposure, but certainly porn by the standard of reason for inclusion.
Happily, several issues ago, the magazine came to the realisation that if a bloke wants porn, there’s plenty of it around from specialist publications, and most of this is much more, um, satisfying than one picture spread of a girl in pre-1960s Playboy levels of attire.
Getting rid of the girl has had another effect, even more pleasing to me. Namely, Geare is now commissioning more stuff from me. So the new issue — #27, 2004, which should be on the newsagency shelves across Australia and New Zealand any day now — has my ‘Know it all’ column in its usual garish yellow (all about DLP projectors), and my history of the Internet. Go get it.
My review of the Whise Profunder 319A subwoofer ($6,499) appeared in Wednesday’s ‘Connect’ section in the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper, unfortunately under someone else’s name. No matter. The graph herewith is something I couldn’t put in the article. This shows the in-room frequency response of this sub. Ignore the dip at 36 hertz. That’s an artefact of microphone/subwoofer location in my particular room. Just look at how deep it goes. The roll-off at the bottom end is not as steep as I would have expected from the enclosure design, so I reckon it’s still delivering some output at 15 hertz.
Philips Electronics flew me up to Sydney today to have a look at some of its forthcoming products. It was focusing on its new, expanded, Flat TV lineup, but there were some other interesting products there as well.
Sharp has released the DVHR350X DVD recorder with a built-in hard disk drive (RRP: $AUS1,769). What’s interesting here is that this raises the hard disk size. Previously all DVD recorders incorporating hard disks have used 80GB models, but this one goes for 120GB. That raises the recording time (in SP mode) from about 35 hours to about 50 hours.
Video systems work on a master/slave basis. If the source and display devices ran their own independent clocks, even extremely accurate ones, there would inevitably be drift — and every so often there would be a hiccough of some kind. So any video source sends not only the picture, but also timing information. The timing info is actually extremely basic: it’s simply the regularly repeated ‘retrace’ signals. The main one happens every 50th of a second (60th for NTSC) at the end of each full screen scan to display a field and is called the ‘Vertical Blanking Pulse’. The subsidiary one happens every 64 microseconds at the end of each scan line, and is called the ‘Horizontal Blanking Pulse’.
Now, rewind the tape to the beginning and play it back. Watch the tape time display. It will increment in the usual way through the recording. But when it gets to the blank bit (that you fast forwarded over) it will stop incrementing. Then, when it gets to the next recording it will resume incrementing. There are no frames in the blank bit for it to count, which is why it stops.
Most subwoofers have a switch on the back that’s labelled ‘Phase’, and has positions of 0 and 180 degrees. What this switch does, electrically, is the second easist thing to understand on a subwoofer’s wiring (the easiest is the ‘on/off’ switch).